"Reaching Health Equity is an immense yet feasible duty that requires grassroots efforts at the individual, community, and national levels." — Dr. Adam Tabriz
Next-Generation Digital Health Infrastructure
A Logistic System Of Creating Opportunity To Establish Health Equity
Health equity is about every individual having the opportunity to reach their full health potential. It eliminates reversible factors such as socioeconomic and geographic barriers from the healthcare delivery equation.
However, health equity is an intricate task that demands diligence, teamwork, and collaboration between stakeholders and the immediate community.
At the grassroots, ensuring health equity has to augment access to quality medical care and options, address unmet essentials and personalize medical care by effectively engaging patients. Furthermore, health equity invariably must incorporate the significance of historical context around patients within the communities.
When establishing health equity, one should never overlook the significance of every individual's cultural and chronological background. The latter merely reflects on every patient's attitude toward their health and compliance with medical advice.
For instance, African Americans' mistrust of the medical community as the upshot of atrocities like forced sterilization is one clear example of how medical interventions like preventative care have become scarce in that community.
Health Equity Starts With Building A Collaborative Environment That Is Decentralized, Inclusive, And Diverse
Healthcare leaders have long realized the significance of building a collaborative culture around the health equity mission. Nevertheless, such a culture must also encompass adaptability to community norms and societal setup.
The system culture that works for one society may stand utterly different from another. That, in succession, will underscore the necessity for decentralization of operations and workflow, as a centralized system hardly ever offers enough flexibility to accommodate diverse environments and inclusivity.
A decentralized diverse team would likely have a spectrum of individualized perspectives that lead to more options and accessibility of services and products.
Incorporating the health equity mission in product development from the research and design stage to testing and implementation can, too, facilitate diversity and inclusion at every step. That can help eliminate prejudice and bias by verifying data quality and comparing it against the population sample. That is also particularly important in disease areas and populations where data capture is challenging.
The infrastructure of a collaborative digital tool that ends with health equity is the product of agile infrastructure that allows product and service development with patients, thus ensuring their individual needs.
Patients engage in their care through the system and share their journeys and experiences with designers, developers, and healthcare stakeholders.
Agile patient engagement through robust logistic solutions helps keep the diversity of patient preferences and expectations in the decision-making loop. It, therefore, offers flexibility to adapt to diverse patient populations and communities.
Since health equity is about matching the patient's expectations and experience by securing enough options to choose from, it must also provide inclusive educational materials and instructions to everyone. It must, in turn, streamline them towards creating health literacy and eliminating language barriers.
The Next Generation Of Digital Health Logistics Is a Cyber-Physical Human System (CPHS)
Establishing a collaborative milieu for health equity demands the next generation of digital logistics.
Health equity is a highly labor-intensive grassroots undertaking. Under a traditional healthcare setting, it may not be feasible and practical. However, considering all the innovative digital solutions within our reach, such a grind can become certitude.
The modern digital logistics infrastructure is a transparent, interactive platform where every actor in patient care can work towards a common goal, health equity, and quality medical service. That is, engaging, educating, directing, and encouraging patients with the utility of a multitude of data and metadata collected from hardware sensors, wearable technologies, data analytics, and human intervention.
The contemporary logistics of health equity, or Cyber-Physical Human System (CPHS), accommodates seamless communication and collaboration of various medical sensors, human healthcare resources, and cloud-based algorithms without undermining the sovereignty of its participants.
The New Digital Health Logistics Is Equitable To Patients And Profitable To Medical Community
Ensuring health equity is merely about extending the opportunity for everyone to be healthy based on their perspectives and socioeconomic as well as geographic standing. That does not attempt to equate to equal healthcare, as everyone may still have different circumstances and preferences.
Furthermore, the next generation of digital logistics in support of health equity must incentivize everyone. Such an incentive is intangible, like staying healthy or happy, or material, like fiscal gain.
Health equity logistics of today promote convergence of every stakeholder through its independent and business-driven initiative centered around patient welfare. Those players control the turning point of the success of a system in creating health equity because it is utterly equitable to patients and profitable to healthcare businesses for decades to come.
References
- McKinsey & Company. "Digital Health: An Opportunity to Advance Health Equity | McKinsey." www.mckinsey.com. Accessed August 15, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/digital-health-an-opportunity-to-advance-health-equity.
- Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation. "Forced Sterilization Policies in the US Targeted Minorities and Those with Disabilities — and Lasted into the 21st Century." ihpi.umich.edu, September 23, 2020. https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/forced-sterilization-policies-us-targeted-minorities-and-those-disabilities-and-lasted-21st.
- McKinsey & Company. "Health Equity: A Framework for the Epidemiology of Care | McKinsey." www.mckinsey.com. Accessed August 15, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/health-equity-a-framework-for-the-epidemiology-of-care.
- Linzer, Katherine, and Shubham Singhal. "How Prioritizing Health Is a Prescription for US Prosperity | McKinsey." McKinsey & Company. www.mckinsey.com. Accessed August 15, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/how-prioritizing-health-is-a-prescription-for-us-prosperity.
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